The internet has provided us with a lot of benefits over the years, and one of them is the ability for anyone, anywhere, to learn a new skill. No longer do we have to enroll in a university course to learn a new subject; but can purchase online courses. Even better yet, we can create our own course as well. With an online course, you can not only present yourself as a leader in your industry but make passive income from your website.
There’s no better way to package up your knowledge than to build a course that could solve someone’s problem; providing a win for your customers while also getting paid.
Launching an online course for the first time is intimidating, to say the least. The fear of what if after all of the hard work you’ve put into creating your course, nobody buys?
By utilizing these 3 tips, you will be able to turn your knowledge into profit:
Presell Your Course
There is an unfortunate situation that I hope you never find yourself in an online course creator, and that is to create a course that no one buys. The way to avoid creating an online course that no one buys is to sell your course before you create it.
“You can have a successful launch with nothing to sell”
This is also known as pre-selling, it’s one of the best ways to protect yourself from wasting your time creating a course that no one wants or is willing to pay for. The goal behind pre-selling is to sell the idea of your course to a small portion of your audience before you’ve created all of your course content. your ideas can be sold before they’ve even been created. That’s the beauty of pre-selling,
Why Pre-sell?
There is no better form of validation that people taking out their credit cards and purchasing something. Preselling is the #1 way to ensure that you’re creating an online product that
1. has an audience
2. is exactly what your audience wants and needs.
“It’s important to make sure your course is something your audience wants before you build it.”
Selling something before you create it is not a new concept. When you pre-sell your courses, you give your audience the chance to become first in line to learn whatever you plan to teach them. Individuals and organizations from all over the world have pre-sold various products and services before they committed to creating them. By doing this, they’re validating the demand for their ideas upfront, before investing the necessary time and resources to create them.
“Validation helps ensure that the time and money that you allocate to creating an online course is utilized in the right areas”
Sales from real customers are the ultimate form of market validation. If no one is willing to pay you for your online course, the demand for your course hasn’t been validated. You need to have an idea that your peeps want not need. You will use this feedback to adjust your game plan as you go and improve the quality of your course before you launch and begin promoting to your entire audience.
Benefits of Pre-Selling
- Protect Your Time and Resources
How do you know if a course will sell before you try to sell it? If you wait until after you complete your online course to offer it for sale, you’ve already lost momentum. Creating an online course can quickly become a resource-intensive endeavor; making It important to ensure that the time and money that you allocate to creating an online course is utilized correctly.
“ A validated product idea means that you have evidence that your product will
actually sell.”
By pre-selling your course, you minimize the risk of spending your time and money on a project that flops, resulting in missed opportunities to grow your business in other ways. Whether the feedback is positive or negative doesn’t matter; so long as you receive feedback and respond accordingly, your presale is a success. If your presale flops and you realize your audience isn’t interested in your idea, you’re much better off if you haven’t poured your soul into 100% of your content.
- Instant Feedback
Collecting feedback from your targeted audience is very powerful. You can use that feedback to increase the value of your course and work out all of the kinks before you make your course available to the public. Remain open with your audience, let them know that you are creating a program which addresses their needs and wants. Use that feedback and understand to see which necessitates need to be included or excluded from your course.
“ Use feedback to gage if your audience likes your topic. If not, onto the next!”
The sooner you involve your target audience in the validation and creation of your online course, the sooner you can create a course based on their actual desires and requests.
- Grow Your Email List
Promoting your course before you create it enables you to build an email list of customers. When your course is ready, you can simply send an email to the people who paid for it, and voila, you’ll have your first round of students.
“ Pre-selling gives you the opportunity to build your email list sooner rather than later”
You can build an email list using many different tactics, from social media to lead magnets, but consumers who buy your online course also go into your database of email contacts. The more subscribers you attract to your business, the more potential customers you have. You don’t just want to sell one digital product — you want to sell as many as possible.
Strategies To Validate
Sell Your Course Before You Create It (Pre-Selling)
Start by outlining your online course. Come up with a title for your course and outline the content you want to include. Then present your course title and outline to your target audience (by hosting a webinar, for example). In the outline, answer questions such as: What topics will you cover? What problems will you solve? What goals will you help your customers meet?
“Anticipate questions or objections your audience may have and answer them in the outline”
out the modules and lessons that will be needed in order to effectively add value to your audience. Make sure each module and lesson have enough notes attached to give them a loose outline of each lesson. This will help cover any whole that may be in your outline.
Set a price for your soon-to-be-released online course, and have a specific sales goal in mind that would justify creating the course. If you plan to charge $500 for your course, for example, you might set a goal of acquiring 10 customers ($5,000 in sales) before you commit to creating it. If you aren’t able to acquire 10 customers, simply refund their purchase and explain to them that there simply wasn’t enough interest in your course to justify creating it.
“Send an email to your list offering your course; use the feedback your receive to improve and add to your content”
create a compelling landing page for your product. The goal of the landing page is to connect with the people who are reading it. You want to genuinely show them that you understand what they’re struggling with.
Launch a Pilot Course
Another approach is to create a minimum viable course (MVC). Sometimes called a pilot course, this would just be your first version of a course that you intend to improve (and eventually charge more for) in the future. Make around
20% of your course to begin with and make that available to your beta testers.
“Collect their early feedback before creating the rest of your course.”
The purpose of creating a pilot course is to prove that people are willing to pay for a course on your chosen topic, and to obtain feedback and testimonials from your students. As you collect questions and feedback from your students, you can begin to improve your course by refining your content or adding additional training and resources to it. Sell your pilot course at a lower price than what you eventually intend to charge. Remember, your pilot course is your minimum viable course, so it’s fair to offer your first group of students a reduced price to enroll in it.
It is much better to pitch your idea for your online course to your target audience and find out they aren’t interested in it than to spend significant amounts of time and money creating an online course that no one buys.
Do you pre-sell your online course? Are there other reasons besides these that you do? Share with me in the comments below!
